This gentle desire so uttered--her strong and grateful feelings towards the master who had taken her, as she expressed it in her rural speech, lean from the moor, and fed her, so that her very bones belonged to him--her happy home, and the power she would acquire to make the latter days in the cottage at Wike St. Marie prosperous and calm,--all these impulses flocked into Thomasine’s heart, and controlled for the time even the remembrance of Cousin John. That poor young man, when the tidings came that she was about to become her master’s wedded wife, suddenly disappeared, and for a while the place of his retreat was unknown; but it afterwards transpired that he had crossed the moor to a “house of religious men,” called the White Monks of St. Cleer, and pleaded for reception there as a needy novice of the gate. His earnest entreaties had prevailed; and six months after his first love, and his last, had put on her silks as a city dame, and begun her rule as the mistress of a goodly house in London, her cousin had taken the vows of his novitiate, and received the first tonsure of St. John. Her married life did not, however, long endure. Three years after the master became the husband, he took the “plague sore,” and died. They were childless; but he bequeathed “all his goods and chattel property, and his well-furnished mansion, to his dear wife Thomasine Bonaventure, now Bunsby;” and the maid of the moor became one of the wealthy widows of London city. Among the MSS. which still survive, there is a letter which announces the event of her husband’s death and bequest, and then proceeds to notify her solemn donation, as a year’s-mind of Master Bunsby, of ten marks to the Reeve of Wike St. Marie, “to the intent that he shall cause skeelful masons to build a bridge at the Ford of Green-a-Moor: yea, and with stout stonework well laid; and see,” she wrote, “that they do no harm to that tree which standeth fast by the brook, neither dispoyle they the rushes and plants that grow thereby; for there did I passe many goodly hours when I was a simple mayde, and there did I first see the kind face of a fathful frend.” But in another missive to her mother, about the same date, there is a touch of tenderness which shows that her woman’s nature survived all changes, and was strong within her still. She writes: “I know that Cousin John is engaged to the monks of St. Cleer. Hath he been shorn, as they do call it, for the second time? Inquire, I beseech, if he seeketh to dispart from that cell? And will red gold help him away? I am prospered in pouch and coffer, and he need not shame to be indebted unto me, that owe so much to him.” But this frank and kindly effort--“the late remorse of love”--did not avail. John had broken the last link that bound him to the world, and was lost to love and her. Reckless thenceforward, therefore, if not fancy-free, and it may be somewhat schooled by the habits and associations of city life, she did not wear the widow’s wimple long.